Oral history interview with Elizabeth "Betsy" A. Toth, 2010 [text/print transcript]

              THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT GREENSBORO
INSTITUTIONAL MEMORY COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: Elizabeth “Betsy” A. Toth
INTERVIEWER: Hermann Trojanowski
DATE: August 5, 2010
HT: Today is Thursday, August 5, 2010. My name is Hermann Trojanowski. I’m in
Sperryville, Virginia with Betsy Toth, and we’re here to conduct an oral history interview
for the UNCG Institutional Memory Collection. Betsy, thank you so much. If you would,
give me your full name. We’ll use this as a test on this tape.
BT: Including my middle name, yes?
HT: That will be fine.
BT: Elizabeth Aurelia Toth.
HT: Okay. Great. Betsy, if you would tell me something about your background, about when
and where you were born, and that sort of thing.
BT: Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1940, October 12th.
HT: And can you tell me a little bit about your family and home life growing up?
BT: Hum. It was interesting, and I don’t think I knew at the time how interesting it was.
Okay. So, my father was off to war, but he wasn’t in the Armed Services. He was
Merchant Marines. He was a radio officer. His name is Frank Toth. He was not my
biological father, but he is the only father I have ever known. My mother had––okay, he
is Presbyterian. My mother was Jewish. It was an interesting upbringing. So––and I had
two sets of relatives in Pittsburgh: dad’s set, the Hungarian Presbyterians—oh, there was
also the Hungarian Catholics. They were split. This doesn’t mean anything now. It meant
a lot then. And, of course, my mother’s side of the family, which was the fun side of the
family, well, actually my dad’s relatives were pretty much fun, too. They drank and
danced a lot. And my mother’s side was pretty intellectual, very witty, educated Jewish
people that I just enjoyed tremendously. And, so, I got a little bit of both. I got brought up
both religions simultaneously. It was kind of a weird upbringing.
HT: And what did your mom do?
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BT: Well, my mother at that time was—I mean she’s dead now. So, is my father. At that time,
you know, she was a mother, a wife.
HT: Right.
BT: What she did to make money particularly while dad was away was she was secretary.
HT: Did you have any siblings?
BT: Did she have—
HT: Did you have any siblings?
BT: Oh, yes. In 1947 my brother was born. And by this time––by that time we were in Falls
Church, Virginia, which is a suburb of Washington, DC. And my father worked for the
Federal Communication Commission.
HT: And where did you go to high school?
BT: Went to high school at Falls Church High, which is in Falls Church.
HT: Right. And did you have any favorite subjects?
BT: I, yes, I had favorite teachers. My favorite subjects always depended on who was
teaching it. I really did like English a lot, but my favorite—my favorite of all was creative
writing with a woman named Betty Lou Toome.
HT: How do you spell her last name?
BT: T-O-O-M-E.
HT: Betty Lou?
BT: Betty Lou Toome. We called her BLT: bacon, lettuce, and tomato.
HT: So, when did you graduate from high school?
BT: I graduated in ’58. Betty Lou Toome is how I got into UNCG.
HT: Was she a graduate by any chance?
BT: She wasn’t, but she knew somebody who, I guess, had at least enough clout to write a
letter who had been a graduate. And I guess of some note. I don’t know what exactly, but
Betty Lou was in literature and writing. I’m going to assume this person was maybe in
literature and writing. I don’t know. Anyway, so, she wrote a letter. And I got a letter in
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August. I was on a waiting list. And, then, finally about one week before school opened I
got the letter saying, “You’ve hit the jackpot.” No, that I could come.
HT: So, this would have been summer of 1958?
BT: Yes.
HT: And had you ever been to North Carolina prior to that?
BT: No.
HT: And how did you—
BT: I went sight unseen.
HT: How did you go from Falls Church down to Greensboro?
BT: Mother and I packed up a couple of trunks with all my stuff and shipped it down. I had a
suitcase, got on the train.
HT: And what—
BT: I say this because my father was against me going to college. He thought that college for
women was a waste of time, and a waste of money. He thought I should be a secretary.
HT: So, he did not support your college ambition at all?
BT: Not a bit.
HT: Did he give you any money to help pay your expenses?
BT: No, what happened eventually is the––let’s see. There was separation between my mother
and my father. He was not always a very nice guy. He was a good guy outside of the
family, inside of the family, not so great. And, so, of course there were child support
payments and mother pushed all those––she took those payments, and that paid for half
of my college education. The other half I made by working in the summer, working in
school.
HT: And what kind of work did you do at school?
BT: Let me see. What did I do? I didn’t work in the cafeteria. I knew I couldn’t do that. I
worked for Katherine Taylor.
HT: Oh, Okay.
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BT: In the speech lab. And I also worked for Susan Barksdale in the art department, cleaning
and cleaning up prints of—art prints that people had gotten and checked out. It was like
they had a library of art prints. And I would clean those up and get them back into their
proper drawers. They had like military map drawers.
HT: A lending library type situation?
BT: Yeah. And, so, I was just sort of—I don’t know custodian. More like I was a maintenance
person.
HT: Oh, gosh. Well, what do you recall from your initial visit to what was then called
Woman’s College [of the University of North Carolina]?
BT: Woman’s College. Well, I arrived and went, and my trunks had arrived. And I unpacked
them. And I—I didn’t know what to think. I mean I had no—I had no preconceived ideas.
HT: Because you had not visited.
BT: I had not visited. Betty Lou Toome told me as much as she could tell me. My mother was
very fearful about all of this in that here I was going off on my own to God knows what,
right? But it was college. You know, how bad can this be? So, and then, you know, I
realized I had a roommate. But I knew that ahead of time and realized that living for me
was going to be very, very different. And I was just mostly interested in the classes. It’s
not that I was a great student, or I was an academic genius. But I realized that I had a
chance—that’s what that gave me, a chance. See, the details like who I roomed with, or
playing bridge at night, seemed to me to be very beside the point.
HT: But before you got there, had you decided what your major was going to be?
BT: In the back of my head, I knew I was going to be a theater major. And the one time I
mentioned this to my mother it was such a resounding putdown. She wanted me to be an
English major. And, of course, the idea was that I would go for two years, and I would
become a teacher or something like that. Get some sort of certificate. And I thought, I’m
going to do four years. They just don’t know it now. I’ll say yeah, “Two years, fine. I’ll
get the certificate.” But I paid no attention to that.
HT: Do you recall which dorm you were in that first year that you were on campus?
BT: Coit [Residence Hall].
HT: Coit, okay.
BT: Yes. And Barbara Boner was the, whatever it was. All the freshmen dorms had a junior
person who lived there.
HT: Like a counselor-type?
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BT: Yeah.
HT: What was her last name, again?
BT: Boner. She’s pretty well known, I think. Barbara Boner, she ended up being student
government this and that and the other. And I thought she was a pretty cool person. She’s
had a wonderful career. In fact I met her at the alumni thing this year. So, she graduated
in ’60. And she’s had a great career in teaching and university administration and all of
that.
HT: Well, did you enjoy your time at WC [Woman’s College]?
BT: That’s a yes and no answer. Some of it I thought was just frightfully awful. But in general
I have to say when I add up the classes, and the professors I had, and some of the students
I knew, and some of the trouble we got into, and all the wonderful things that opened up
for me, I would have to say yeah. I don’t know if the words “enjoyment,” it transcends
the word enjoyment.
HT: Well, tell me about some of the professors you had.
BT: I had Randall Jarrell, which was—yeah, that was enjoyable. That was more than
enjoyable. That was a prize. And a guy named Bobby Watson, Robert Watson, who
taught world literature. He was—because of the books and the literature he chose just—I
wasn’t getting that stuff in any other class. Arthur W. Dixon, “AWD,” as we called
him—every Thursday he had a little salon at his place. And we had a little—we had a
little rhyme, “T Day, T Day, AWD Day.” That was every—I got a lot of this from—when
I was a freshman—from the upper class women who already were in [the] New Guilford
[Residence Hall] Black Stockings [Girls]. And certainly I bonded with them more than I
ever bonded with any of the people in my freshman class. And the reason was that they
had the kind of style of life, or learning, or adventure, or discovery that I wanted. And I
recognized that real fast. And knew that what happened in New Guilford, and from those
people, was going to be very important in my life. And, indeed, it was. They’re the ones
who turned me on to who the professors were, people like [Warren] Ashby, and, you
know, and the history professors, [Richard] Bardolph, and [Eugene] Pfaff. Well, I got
Pfaff anyway, because that was just part of the required history course. [John] Beeler and
Bardolph were Chinese gods in one of our plays. I [laughing]—they were great. And like
I said Randall Jarrell was a treasure. There were some people in the classics department,
a guy named Michael [Dunn]. I cannot remember a last name. And he was kind of
interesting. I think I had a little crush on him for awhile. But it was not a big thing. It was
more that he was the youngest of all the professors, and he was so academically bright
that, you know, you couldn’t help but be attracted to that.
HT: So, did you move over to New Guilford in your second year—or?
BT: I was pretty much entrenched in there by the end of my first semester, freshman. I would
technically live in the freshman dorm, because you did. But, basically—
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HT: Did you live there?
BT: Yeah. New Guilford—it was pretty much third floor. It wasn’t the whole dorm. Third
floor is where all the Black Stockings [Girls], or the weirdoes were, or whatever they
were called.
HT: How did that name come about, do you know?
BT: Oh, because they wore black stockings.
HT: Was that sort of the beatnik type—
BT: Yes, it was beatnik association. And people thought it was just weird, just outstandingly
weird, because it reminded people of like witches or something. I’m sure. And, actually,
in the winter black stockings made so much sense. And I mean I didn’t wear black
stockings when it was warm, because that was kind of like not fun. But I understood what
the beatnik thing was. And, of course, everybody thought they were weird. But I think it
was kind of—in the back of people’s minds even though they didn’t use the word, I think
there was a witch association.
HT: How long had the Black Stocking Girls been around to your knowledge?
BT: I’m not too sure—certainly, at least two years before me, and three, maybe, because
Bertha Harris, Carolyn Harris, Laura Lingle. I can’t remember all the names now, which
is unfortunate, Nancy Honeycutt, and there were more. Mary Minkins. She had a middle
name, too. And they always used the whole name, and I cannot remember that. So, they
were—yeah, they were what I wanted to be.
HT: So, they were not freshmen. I assume they were probably upper classmen.
BT: Yes, they were juniors and seniors. And the thing was in New Guilford there was—on the
third floor there was half of the floor that had, obviously, been repaired, and it was a
different color than the rest of the floor. And when—at the beginning of the year when
they would assign people, and you would find out that you had been assigned a roommate
who was a home ec[onomics] major or something, Laura Lingle, would give them a tour,
and as they passed that patch she would say, “Oh, that. That’s where the baby bones are
buried.” That was a joke.
HT: But that frightened off—
BT: Well, that among other various things. We never did anything reprehensible. We just
created a kind of atmosphere in which they were only too happy to leave. And what that
meant is that you ended up with single rooms, single, yeah. And—Because nobody else
wanted to be put [things] in there that wasn’t already there. So, even my freshman year
there was always a place where I could drop [off] my stuff and, you know, have a part of
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a closet or something like that. I really didn’t sleep there or stay there, but it was my
home away from home.
HT: Oh, gosh. What about the dress code? What do you recall about the dress code in those
days?
BT: Oh, that—that was something you just, boy did that get under my skin. Yeah, on Sunday
you were supposed to wear little flats, or little heels, and hose, and proper dress and your
class jacket or something else. And, of course, I’m working over at the theater. Sunday is
a big day. You got a lot done, because there were no classes. So, you’d show up in jeans.
Well, that wasn’t good enough. So, we would always have a wrap around skirt to put
over the jeans. Well, that wasn’t good enough either. Because we didn’t have hose, and
we didn’t have heels. And a lot of us just got really—like we’d had enough. And there
was enough people who went to enough people and said, “Look, you don’t do this on
Saturday.” And for the Jewish girls that’s their Sunday. That’s their Sabbath, and you
don’t require this on Saturday. So, you’re making a distinction. And that distinction is not
appreciated. And you’re requiring that everybody do this because it’s a Sunday thing
because of religious connotation and church and all of that. And not everybody is there.
And especially things like the art majors, music majors, the theater majors, you’ve got to
give them a little leeway. They’re getting their extracurricular stuff done at that time.
Anyway, you get the idea, so.
HT: So, what did you and some of the girls do?
BT: Well, we did speak to some people using those words of what we hoped were of
persuasion. The other thing we did one year is we all got dressed up like them. All the
theater majors, and some of the music majors, and some of the other people who lived in
New Guilford, we all got in our little plaid blouses that we had got from the store called
The Villager. That was the thing. And little round circle pins, and the perfect little pleated
skirts, and the little cardigan, and the hose, and the flats or the heels. And did our hair the
way they did it, in big bouffants. And we went in on a Sunday one day. And everybody is
in there, and we all went in as a group. And people stared. I mean they noticed. And we
went through the line. And we sat down at a table, or tables in the middle, and we did a
conversation. Hey, we were theater people. We knew how to do this. We did a
conversation like they did. Not discussing politics, or the important things of the day, but
discussing how you were going to do your fingernails that night, or what kind of shirt
your boyfriend wore, or how you were going to buy a new pair of Weejun’s loafers, the
kind of what we considered insipid and we thought that we were better than them. That’s
obvious. And I don’t know that we were, but we thought we had a handle on something
that was beyond all that. And, you know, and how you would play the bridge hand the
night before, right? All of us knew how to play bridge; we just thought it was stupid to
waste your time doing it. I mean to the point that they did. I mean hours were spent. So,
we did that whole conversation. And we did it just loud enough—
HT: Was this in the dining hall?
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BT: Yes. So, then, everybody could hear us and get the point. We can do what you do. We
know how to do this. We can do this every day. We choose not to. I mean that was the
point. And, yes, we’re here to make you look silly. We weren’t trying to disguise that in
any way. So, you see by the time I sat in, I [laughing]—all of us had some history of
being ready to step into that kind of a role in a dissident—we were dissidents. There was
no doubt about it. You know, and another—if it had been another ten years later, we
would have been SES or whatever, student—whether any of us would have been Weather
[Underground] people, I do not know. But we—I don’t know that we would have gone
into bombing. But we would have definitely—and, in fact, I was part of the anti-war
movement in the early ’70s, May Day, and DC, and et cetera. Saw my friends killed
during that. And, yeah, they actually killed people—they always talked about Penn State.
More people died because of what was called May Day, May 1971, then died at Kent
State.
HT: I’m not familiar with May Day. Can you tell me about that?
BT: It was to demonstrate against the war, and we had all of these—Potomac Park, and we
had—and the people stayed in tents there overnight. And we had, you know, whatever
you got permission. We had a permit for that. And in the morning at about 4:00 to 4:30 in
the morning the park police rode through there on horses. Just like they did against the
American Indians, trampling the tents. Some people died right there. The others that they
arrested and took to RFK [Robert F. Kennedy Memorial] Stadium. There were thousands
of them being held in RFK for two weeks, at least. And they were held there without
being able to talk to lawyers, or anybody, and they often went days without food or
water. And some of them died. I mean they had been beat up to begin with, and there was
no—and it was sort of part of the untold story of that. But they weren’t violent. What was
done against them was violent, et cetera. So, I’ve always been on that side of the line.
HT: Well, if we can go back to WC.
BT: Right.
HT: Tell me about some of the extracurricular activities you were involved with, such as
clubs. I know you were a theater person.
BT: Theater, theater, theater, theater. But I had this one little thing. When I was in high school
I was a three-scored, four-year letter. Women’s hockey, field hockey, basketball, and
softball. And I was fairly athletic, and I was fairly good at it, not scholarship good. But,
hey, Woman’s College wasn’t giving scholarships for it anyway, so. But even if they had
been, I wasn’t scholarship good. But I was good enough. And when the fall came, which,
you know, once the weather turned with a little bit of a nip, when I wasn’t in class, on the
weekends, and I wasn’t at the theater, I would just make my way over to the playing
fields. And there was usually a scrimmage, a field hockey scrimmage going on. And I
had my field hockey stick with me, and I would just take it with me over there, hang
around. And, eventually, I’d get into the scrimmage. And I loved it. It was my one little
oddity. The theater majors thought it was weird for that. The phys[ical] ed[ucation]
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majors that were there, and knew I was a theater major, wondered what in the heck I was
doing there. But I was as good as them on the field, absolutely. And all their coaches had
gone to what—the school that turned out a lot of phys. ed. teachers, UNC [University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill], WC was starting to. But a lot of them, particularly in field
hockey, field hockey was still very new for North Carolina. It’s not now. They’re a
power, actually. But at that time it was Virginia. It was Virginia, Massachusetts,
Maryland, and Pennsylvania pretty much. And, so, a lot of the coaches for that came out
of Madison [College] in Virginia, which is now called James Madison [College]. It was
Dolley Madison [College] then. It should have stayed Dolley Madison, anyway. They
came out of there, and they knew my coaches from high school. So, whenever they
needed—when they were short a person for a game, they’d ask me if I would come play
for the team. And I could play as well as the coaches, because I had grown up learning
that style of hockey. I could play it better than any of the phys. ed. majors, that was for
sure. But that was because it was very new to them. So, I had this funny little quirk. It
wasn’t a club or anything, but I had—I was definitely drawn to going over and doing
athletic things on my free time, which made me kind of a weirdo to my weirdo friends.
[laughing]
HT: Now, I guess you had your theater classes, and your theater productions were all in
Aycock Auditorium, is that correct?
BT: That is correct.
HT: At lunchtime we talked about some of the ghosts on campus.
BT: There was a ghost in Aycock, absolutely.
HT: Did you have any tales you can relate about that, that you recall?
BT: No, because I’m kind of different than some people about ghosts. I—if nothing happens
that’s really scary, then you just accept the ghost. You know that there is a presence. I
mean you’re certainly aware of somebody in the way back of the upper tier. And
sometimes at night when everybody had gone home, I’d stay with the work light on
stage, and work on pieces I was working on. And I would play to that ghost in the back
row whether I saw the ghost or not. That was who I was projecting to, playing to,
absolutely. So, there was a sense of that person there. And we, you know, every now and
then there was some odd happenings. But nothing that I thought was scary. I mean
finding the little pints of vodka and liquor up in the flies, underneath the ropes, was more
of an eye opening thing to me than the ghosts. Aycock was a roadhouse for all the union
shows that came through, the Broadway shows. And there was a good group of union
guys in Greensboro and around. And they would call them in to work the union shows.
And up on the fourth floor in the fly gallery you worked on the ropes of the
counterweight system. And, so, when they kept their little bottles underneath the ropes.
And I found some one day. And I thought, “What?” And, then, I realized what was going
on there. So, there was a lot of interesting stuff like that going on. I didn’t have to look at
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the ghost. And this ghost never did anything that was entre or over the line, a very benign
ghost.
HT: Do you recall anything that did happen?
BT: Oh, it was the ball of fire that went from the catwalk at the lighting board and went
straight up to the roof and disappeared. I realized that probably came out of the lighting
board, but a green ball of flames says the word “gas” to me, and there was no gas. So,
that was the only thing that I thought was maybe beyond the norm, yeah.
HT: Do you know the story behind the ghost by any chance?
BT: I don’t actually, because I mean I think at the time I was not even aware it was Jane
Aycock. It was just “the ghost.”
HT: Well, I think students gave her that name sometimes in the ’80s or something like that.
BT: Right.
HT: This is a fairly new name, I understand.
BT: Right. Well, she may have manifested and let somebody know that.
HT: What were some of the theater productions that you participated in?
BT: Oh, yeah. Let’s see. In the musicals there was South Pacific, The King and I, which
almost killed—by dropping the scenery that was coming down to the flies. I let it come
down too fast and almost killed some of the actors. Anyway, and, then, I learned how to
do that better after that.
HT: So, you were—
BT: I was on stage crew and lighting a lot. I was an actor in things that weren’t the musicals.
No voice here. No voice. Couldn’t help that out at all. But let’s see. We did The King and
I. We did Annie Get your Gun. We did South Pacific. Marilyn [Lott] was Bloody Mary in
the South Pacific as a matter of fact. But I liked the straight plays. We did Bertolt
Brecht’s The Good Person of Setzuan, which I thought was just fabulous. And a whole
new concept of set design than anything I had ever been exposed to. And, then, of course,
there was Beeler and Bardolph, our history professors. And the third one might have been
Pfaff. They were the three Chinese gods. They come down from the flies. So, one night,
not during a performance, it was dress rehearsal, the flies got stuck, and they were neither
in heaven, nor in hell.
HT: They were in purgatory.
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BT: They were standing—they were in between, and we couldn’t get them up, and we
couldn’t get them down. I wasn’t flies for that, but I went up to help, because by that time
I knew a lot. I was a junior or something. I don’t know. And, so, after about fifteen
minutes passed, and those poor history professors swinging in the breeze there, all of a
sudden Bardolph opens his mouth and starts singing, Nearer my God to Thee. It was one
of those moments that we should have kept it in the show, you know? It was just great. It
was just great.
HT: It sounds like you had a lot of fun.
BT: I did. And we did some important work theater wise. I thought doing the Brecht and some
of that stuff, you know, was—I mean important in that it pried my brain opened and put
new stuff in.
HT: And, so, you worked, I guess all four years—
BT: You bet.
HT: —in Aycock?
BT: Yes, and I was a member of—the big thing then was sort of honor society as it were for
theater people, but it was based as much on your participation in the theater, so, it wasn’t
just the theater majors, was Masqueraders. And I was a member of Masqueraders.
HT: Did you ever work the Parkway Playhouse up in Burnsville, [North Carolina] by any
chance?
BT: No.
HT: You didn’t got there?
BT: No.
HT: Let’s see. Well, what social and academic events really stand out in your mind during the
four years you were at Woman’s College?
BT: Well, academic events. There used to be these things that were—I don’t know who they
were organized by. And they would happen in what was basically the student union
building, building that was named for it, which escapes me at the moment.
HT: Elliott University [Center]?
BT: Yeah, Elliott Hall. Yeah. So, it would be people like Ashby, or Beeler, or Bardolph,
Dixon, Randall Jarrell. They would get together—and some science professors. And they
would get together, and they would—several times of the year you would have somebody
real—Robert Lowell, Robert Frost, and, yes, they would do the big thing on the stage.
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But, then, in one of the big meeting rooms there, there was one really big room in Elliott
Hall.
HT: Cone Ballroom.
BT: Possibly. And I don’t know if it was called that then. It might have been. And with a
smaller group in which there was a lot of give and take and questions and answers, and
people like Robert Lowell, Jarrell, and Frost sitting there, the three of them, reminiscing
about old times between them.
HT: Was this the Arts Forum by any chance?
BT: Well, sometimes it was the Arts Forum. Sometimes it was just, yeah, they had—
and one of the—then they would have these things called—there was basically the arts
and humanities against the sciences. And they had a word for it, what they call it now.
But, you know, it was basically, you know, is everything genetically determined, or, you
know, nature or nurture, that sort of thing. And there were wonderful, wonderful debates.
And we would all go in. And people would sit on different sides and choose up sides.
And, you know, it wasn’t a sporting event. But it was an intensely contested event. And
those would happen several times a year. I thought those were outstanding, because
sometimes I think I learned more at those events than I was learning in a class.
And, then, one year, and this was at the instigation of either Bertha or Carolyn
Harris, and I think it was Carolyn, one of them, anyway, they had Audre Lorde, the great
black woman poet in. And this was before she was the great black woman. This was just
as she was getting started. But some people recognized that she was going to have a
major voice. And certainly some of the faculty did. And Bertha and Carolyn did. And
Nancy Honeycutt. And they managed to get her there. Okay, woman poet, black, lesbian.
And it was part of the Arts Forum. And she packed the place. And the fact I thought
given all of what I knew to be bigotry and small-mindedness that was on that campus, the
fact that they got Audre Lorde there, and, of course, it was very much because they had
the backing of Randall Jarrell and all of the professors with clout, I thought that was
something. I bet you there weren’t many universities in the United States at that time
willing to have Audre Lorde there. She has always been one of my favorite poets since
then. Her poems are so much of the body and heart of not being there isn’t a lot of
intellectual in there, because there is. But, you know, it’s very flesh and blood with huge
amount of heart. And—but on a very, very high level of poetry.
HT: Was that the only time you ever had a chance to meet her?
BT: Yeah, yeah. Oh, I went to some things where she read after that back in DC, but I never
met her then. Yeah, I got to meet her at Woman’s College. Same thing, I actually meet
Robert Lowell and Robert Frost.
HT: It’s just amazing.
13
BT: Yeah. In that small forum, not on the big stage. And things like that. I don’t know. You
can’t even put a price on that. That was amazing stuff.
HT: You mentioned earlier, you talked a little about the Black Stocking Girls, is there
anything you wanted to add that you didn’t discuss earlier about the Black Stocking
Girls, about their history?
BT: Well, just that they were in New Guilford. They were very intellectual. They were very
out there. They were very liberal, probably radical. I certainly—to anybody from North
Carolina it was pretty radical. And, you know, some of them were lesbian. I don’t know
if that was known on general campus. It certainly was known by the people who knew
them. And the people who knew them didn’t give a shit. Excuse me for saying that word
on tape, but basically, you do not have to erase that. So, there was all that. They were
very leftists, very radical. They weren’t what you wanted. These were the people other
people’s mothers had warned them against. You know, what I’m—And I don’t know
how long they had been there. My guess is—okay, take out Jack Kerouac, add two years,
what was Jack Kerouac, ’58, pretty much, right, ’57 to ’56, right there? I’m guessing they
hadn’t been there before that. Because that really, it wasn’t Jack Kerouac specifically, but
a whole new opening of literature, poetry, and everything happened.
You know, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, what’s his name? [Allen] Ginsberg, all of that.
Once that happened, and the flood gates opened, then people could do something beside
showing them [John] Keats and [Percy] Shelly or “Kelly” and “Sheets.” I don’t like
Shelley by the way. Keats is all right. [Lord] Byron is okay. Shelley just drives me up the
wall. Anyway, so, and see I didn’t even agree with some of my compatriots. But that’s
what I pretty much—and, then, them wearing black stockings and living in New
Guilford, could set so many of the people in the campus on their ear.
HT: Now, who was upset about the Black Stocking Girls?
BT: Oh, I would say at least half the campus, all those North Carolina Bible Belt girls.
HT: Right. How about the administration, how did the administration—?
BT: Oh, they didn’t like them at all. They didn’t like any of the “stockings” [Black Stocking
Girls]. In fact, from what I gathered, the year before I was a freshman, and I don’t know
that I have this story exactly right. But shall we say that Bertha and Carolyn as best
friends were broken up by the administration. And one stayed on campus and was forced
to live in Mendenhall [Residence Hall] with a student council person as her roommate,
forced. I mean they wouldn’t let her live anywhere else. And the other Harris, I forget
which one, lived in and which one lived out. Since she was from Greensboro , [she] had
to go home. It was either that, or they would have expelled them, and that they were
going to expel them, but the faculty, who were great fans of Bertha Harris and Carolyn
Harris—
HT: These were sisters, right?
14
BT: No.
HT: They were not? All right.
BT: So, one interesting sidebar to the Harris stories is that the Harris who lived in
Greensboro, which I believe was Carolyn Harris. It’s her father who was the owner and
manager of Woolworth’s.
HT: Oh, okay.
BT: It’s that Harris.
HT: Okay.
BT: So, I’ve always found that kind of—I don’t know. It brings a smile to my face.
HT: We have his collection. She [Carolyn Harris] donated his scrapbooks and other things
that he had gathered during the [Greensboro] Sit-ins. That is amazing.
BT: Yeah.
HT: Ann Dearsley knew her from Raleigh, because the Harrises had—
BT: Yes.
HT: He was the manager of Woolworth’s in Durham, Raleigh, and various places. And they
[Carolyn Harris and Ann Dearsley] had gone to school together in Raleigh.
BT: Exactly.
HT: That is strange.
BT: Right. And even more interesting is that the newspaper article that they were—
that I was—that I wrote—I was criticizing something Ann Dearsley-Vernon had—Ann
Dearsley had written. And part of what they were sort of communicating to me was they
didn’t—they were glad I had spoken up against Ann Dearsley’s writing. Because I guess
they didn’t like Ann Dearsley. Now, I didn’t let that change me. I liked Ann Dearsley.
But I also liked them. But, obviously, there was a little animosity going on there.
HT: Oh, my gosh. That is interesting. Well, a couple of quick questions about the professors
and administrators on campus. Did you by any chance know the chancellor at that time?
BT: Not intimately. I knew, you know, I certainly knew Chancellor [Gordon] Blackwell and
all that happened with that. [Chancellor] Pierson I’m looking at this. William Whatley
Pierson. I—
15
HT: He was only there for just that one year. He was sort of the interim chancellor.
BT: I see, because my knowledge of him is like, what. Dean of Students, Katherine Taylor.
HT: Yes. You had some classes with her?
BT: No, no, I didn’t have classes.
HT: You didn’t have classes?
BT: No, she was the dean of students. And, you know, she was iron—she was iron fist. And
she actually had threatened to expel all of us who took, and in part got that done, in
Marilyn’s case. But Marilyn got back in. But her—she had threatened to expel all of us
who took part—
HT: In the Sit-ins?
BT: —in the Sit-ins, yes. And she and I had a—I would say a good thirty-minute talk in
which we did sort of verbal fisticuffs about that.
HT: What do you recall about that conversation?
BT: Well, her quoting people like Judge Learned Hand to me and other people like that, you
know, and speaking that, you know, if you broke the law you must therefore, of course,
even if you think you are right you must understand that you have to suffer the
consequences of the law, et cetera, et cetera et cetera. And I looked at her straight in the
eye, and I said, “You know, I know that these great jurists had that point, and I’m sure
they had a reason for that, but I want them to go—and you to go tell that to my ancestors
who were killed in the ovens in Europe about breaking the law.” And she said, “Oh, well,
that was the Nazis. That wasn’t”—I said, “No, that’s legal law. That was a legal country.
Those were legal laws. Those were the laws of the country. We didn’t like them, but they
were the laws of the country. And if you broke the law, you died, pretty much. You
know, or you were taken—it was for other citizens, they had to turn people like my
ancestors in.” And I said, “You know, my ancestors is a whole group of aunts and uncles
I do not have, because they died over there.
And you may have a point in what you say, but I think there are times when there
is a higher point to be made about what’s right and what’s not right.” And I said, “It’s in
that”—what’s the word I’m looking for—“it was with that in mind that I did the Sit-ins.
Because you have to stand up, because when you don’t things like Nazi, Germany
happen.” And she said, “I think this discussion is over,” and dismissed me. As far as I
know, I was out of school. But the pink slip never came. You know what I mean? I didn’t
think I won the argument, but I think I had at least—I would say it was probably a draw.
HT: Well, if we can backtrack, how did you—how did it come about that you decided to
participate in the Greensboro Sit-ins?
16
BT: Well, I had heard that they were happening.
HT: Right.
BT: And I didn’t hear it from Marilyn, or Genie [Eugenia Seaman], or Ann. I heard it from—I
was friends with a woman named Lily, Lily Wiley who was a black student, who in all of
the things that are mentioned about the black students who broke the barrier and whatnot,
JoAnne Smart, and all of that—
HT: Right.
BT: What?
HT: Yes.
BT: Which is very important. Lily Wiley is never mentioned. But, then, again, she wasn’t a
barrier breaker. She came—well, she came with my class. But she knew all those
students. And none of them wanted her to do the—to go down there. Lilly was
interesting. She was not so black. She was tan. And she was also, I think, part Cherokee.
And, anyway, she’s the one who told me.
HT: So, was she a friend, or a dorm mate, or—
BT: She knew a lot of the woman at Bennett [College], and the guys, very much the guys at
[North Carolina] A&T [State College]. In fact one, one holiday—home—instead of going
home, we went up to DC, and I stayed with her and her friends at Howard University.
And that was a real eye opener, because I was always the only white person.
HT: And how did you meet Lily Wiley?
BT: She was just on campus, and she was, you know, she wasn’t a member of the “Black
Stockings,” but she might as well have been. I think I met her my sophomore year. And
you kind of recognize a kindred spirit.
HT: So, she wasn’t a theater major?
BT: No, I don’t think she was, though, she would be over at the theater some times. I mean I
think she congregated wherever arts people who congregated, yes.
HT: She’s the one who told you that this was happening downtown?
BT: Right.
HT: Of course, in those days, as you well know, television wasn’t as prominent. There was
no—
17
BT: There was Channel 2 [Greensboro television station]—
HT: Channel 2.
BT: —did. And there’s footage, which is how the college found out we were there.
HT: We have looked for that footage, and, apparently, it’s been taped over.
BT: Well, I don’t think they taped back in those days.
HT: Whatever they had, yes. So, that’s how Katherine Taylor found out that you had
participated?
BT: That’s what I was led to believe at the time. There may have been some reporters
involved, too. I don’t know. But there was the footage, and I saw the footage.
HT: Oh, you did?
BT: The footage was right at the end of the day when all the black students would come
gather out in front of the door, out on the sidewalk, and while things were being thrown
at them—though nothing lethal, things like eggs—they would sing gospels.
HT: Now, did you participate just one day, or one afternoon, or?
BT: My recollection—and, you know, these things dim with time, it was more than one day. I
was down there at least two, possibly three, and not more than three, I think. Because I
think on the third day—that after that there was a cessation of, [beeping sound] oh, you
may want to check this. We’re getting a brown out.
HT: It’s recording.
BT: Okay. I’ll be close to this. There was a cessation of hostilities. Everybody backed off for
about a week or two while things were—while they tried to work some stuff out. Then
they resumed again. By the time they resumed again, I was knee deep in a production at
the theater, and I may have gone down once after that. Certainly not with my college
blazer on.
HT: Now, do you recall—the first time you went down, was it that first week? Because I think
Ann Dearsley and Eugenia [“Genie”] Seaman, and Marilyn went down, we think on that
Thursday, because their photographs were in the paper that Friday.
BT: Yeah, but I think they were down there on Wednesday.
HT: On Wednesday.
18
BT: I think they were down there pretty early in the process, whether that’s stuff didn’t appear
until Friday or not. I was there that first week.
HT: The first week, okay.
BT: I was not there the first two days. And that’s—that I know. I think I was there
Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Or it might have been Thursday, Friday, and, then, a
couple—a day the next week. And, then, both sides agreed not to do anything for about
two weeks. And like I said after that I was knee deep in a production of theater, and I did
go down one more time, but not with a group of students or anything like that.
HT: Did you wear your college blazer?
BT: The first time I went down I did. And it wasn’t mine. I couldn’t afford a college blazer.
So, one of my friends say, “Oh, I’ll lend you mine.” So—
HT: It was February, so it was kind of chilly out, I assume?
BT: Yes. So, I did. I went down with the college blazer. And, of course, that was one of the
things that really ticked off the administration.
HT: Yes. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back, so to speak.
BT: So, any time I went down after that was without [wearing a] blazer. It’s the one thing, I
think, we all agreed to. I think to stay in school I think they asked us not to do the blazer,
and we said we wouldn’t do the blazer. And, then, what’s his name? Singletary [Ed. note:
the chancellor at this time was Gordon Blackwell], whoever it was, gave that speech in
Aycock. And although the words don’t seem scathing. If you would have heard the
speech, and been there, you would have known he was definitely pointing a finger at us.
And it was after that, we were actually threatened with expulsion. Even though we agreed
to the no-college-blazer thing.
HT: Right. Now, were you aware that Claudette [Graves] Burroughs-White, I think went there
several times, did you by any chance know her? She was, I think, class of ’61. She was
the black student [from Woman’s College who participated in the Greensboro Sit-ins].
BT: Right. I knew who she was but did not know her.
HT: I’m assuming that—was she threatened with expulsion?
BT: I do not know that. I really, of course, knew the people I knew: Lily, myself, Marilyn,
Genie, and Ann Dearsley. Yes, among my compatriots around the theater department and
the people I knew in New Guilford, basically, they were positive to what we had done. Or
they didn’t say anything at all. So, it was—but nobody that we knew personally—is it
still going?
19
HT: Yes.
BT: Okay. No one that we knew personally if they didn’t think we should have done it, they
weren’t coming out and saying so. We got no negative off the people that we knew well.
I’m not—I did know that some people did not speak of it, and I was assuming that maybe
they were not quite so fond of what we had done. But we’re going to put us out.
HT: So, after it happened it was a known fact around campus that this had happened?
BT: I don’t know about around campus. I have to—like you, point or we’ve talked, there is
sort of the world that I mixed in, which was theater or humanities, a group of somewhat
more liberal, leftist radical.
HT: And did you go downtown alone?
BT: The time I went they went down, I think, together. The first time I went down I just
walked downtown, and I walked home.
HT: Now, let’s see—
BT: It never occurred to me that that would be a problem.
HT: When I talked to Genie a couple of years ago up in Rhode Island, she said that she had
walked down probably that afternoon, but she, Ann, and Marilyn were sort of—[men
from A&T] sort of got around to protect them—pretty much put them in a taxi cab.
BT: Put them in a cab, yes.
HT: Because by that time it was dark, and they left about 5:00 to 5:30 [p.m.]. And they didn’t
realize that they were probably in a lot of danger if they had decided to walk [back to
campus].
BT: I guess I just sort of wandered away. When you’ve got maybe three blocks away—
HT: And, of course, they had their class jackets on, so they were identifiable.
BT: Right.
HT: So, I guess—
BT: I know I wore the class jacket once, but only once.
HT: Well, when you first got there, what was the scene like, do you recall?
BT: Well, you would walk into Woolworth’s, and the lunch counters—you went in the door
nearest the corner—there might have been two entrances. But the entrance that was
20
nearest the corner, this is the way I remembered it anyway, the lunch counter was further
over toward the right.
HT: On the right?
BT: Yeah. So, when you first walked in, it looked, to me, like any old Woolworth’s that I had
ever been in. I mean—Woolworth’s were all over the DC area. I knew Woolworth’s same
way about walking into any Woolworth’s and know exactly where sewing or the notions
counter was, you know. The same layouts. So, that seemed the same. And, then, you
became aware over to your right that there was a whole different thing happening, a
whole different feeling. And mostly you got that not so much from all of the students
who were sitting at the counter, but from all of the white people who were standing
behind the students sitting at the counter, being very loud and vocal and threatening, and
all of that.
And when I sat down and did the usual thing with the waitress who came up [and]
said, “Hi, honey, can I get you anything?” The usual waitress line. I said, “Well, yeah, I
guess I’d like a Coke,” or whatever, a piece of pie. “But, you know, these people were
here ahead of me, and I don’t think they’ve been served yet.” And she said, “Well, we’re
not serving.” And I said, “Oh, really? Then you’re not serving me.” I mean you went
through this litany, as it were, to make the point. And I was sitting—to my right were a
bunch of Bennett girls, ladies, and the Bennett ladies were so much more well-behaved
than I was. They were dressed better. Their deportment was better. Everything. And they
were the ones who taught me how to do this right. A couple of times I was about to go
after the person who was threatening to hit me upside the head with a two-by-four from
behind, which you could see in the mirror, big mirror. That’s the way those counters were
done. And they said, “Honey, if you even look like you’re going to do that, we are quit
with you. You’re out of here. We do not need that. That will not work.” And I said,
“Yeah, but she—” And she said, “I don’t care if she does hit you. You do nothing. You
learn to do nothing. You learn to just sit and be. And you conduct yourself with dignity
and quiet, et cetera.” And, so, I learned—in one day I learned my civil rights behavior.
The ladies from Bennett had it down. They were the best.
HT: Were there students from both Bennett and A&T?
BT: Yeah, the guys were more off to the left, and I was down about the last third of the
counter on the right side. And that was Bennett girls, and there were some up there, too.
But I just happened to have sat beside a contention.
HT: Were there other white participants in the Sit-ins?
BT: When I was there? Well, yeah, Marilyn was there.
HT: Okay.
BT: And, actually, a couple of people who, I think, were not from Woman’s College.
21
HT: From the general community, I guess?
BT: Or they could have been from Guilford [College]. I think there was some from Guilford.
HT: How about Greensboro College?
BT: I have a feeling Guilford would have been more like it.
HT: Okay.
BT: Maybe Greensboro College, but I think Guilford. There was some real bright lights over
in Guilford in that college. And it’s a Quaker school.
HT: Right.
BT: So, the only thing that got me to participate is Lily told me, and that was it. I knew that
that was wrong. I mean what was happening, and that this is one of those times in life
when you stand up for somebody that’s not yourself.
HT: Right. Were you there a half a day or a whole day, or just a few hours?
BT: I would say the first day I was there at least two hours. And, I mean one of the things—
and Lily laid this out to me that it was a big deal at A&T and Bennett. You didn’t miss a
class. You didn’t give your administration a chance to get you for missing a class. So, I
was there for about two hours, and I went back to a class. I may have left before the other
girls got put in a cab, the other women, sorry. And—because I had a class. And I—and
the next two times I went I definitely tried to work it around my class schedule and make
sure I got back in time for the class.
HT: Do you recall seeing TV and newspaper reporters around the times you were there?
BT: You know, I was not aware of them. I mean—I guess I was just naïve, et cetera. I was so
surprised to see that footage on Channel 2 because I had not been aware that anybody had
been there taking that footage. I don’t think they taped back then. I don’t know what it
was they did. It was a different process. The fact that nobody has the masters from that, I
bet you somebody does.
HT: People have told us they have no idea what happened to them.
BT: Well, Channel 2 doesn’t have them anymore. I’ve heard that, yeah. I wonder if the
Smithsonian does. At any rate—
HT: There is a very famous photograph that we think was taken either Wednesday or
Thursday, because it was published in the Greensboro Daily News that Friday morning
of—Marilyn’s there, Genie’s there, and Ann’s there. And that original photograph has
disappeared. We have clippings, but the newspaper archives or library doesn’t know
22
where they are. And nobody even knows who the photographer was. And, so, there is no
way to trace it. Those things do happen, unfortunately.
BT: Well, remember that was also a time in which photographers didn’t have really have—
they didn’t get credits.
HT: That’s true.
BT: It could have been—
HT: It could have been freelanced or just—
BT: Well, I bet a reporter went down and took their own shots. They didn’t have— though
you’d think some—the Greensboro Daily News would. I mean it was a good enough
newspaper to have that. You know what would be interesting to find out is one of the
more liberal newspapers of the time in North Carolina, of course, was the Charlotte
Observer. Is it the Charlotte Observer?
HT: Yes.
BT: I’d be interested—it might be worth a call to find out if they sent anybody up and they
have anything. Because although it wasn’t in their town, they were more on the ACLU
[American Civil Liberties Union] side of the world than almost any newspaper in the
South, so.
HT: That is a good thought. I’ll have to maybe follow up on that thing. Well, I think you
mentioned that you walked back to campus each time—
BT: Yes.
HT: —you participated. When you got back to campus, did anyone know that you had
participated, or did you tell anybody?
BT: I probably did. You know, I can’t remember a specific conversation. It isn’t the kind of
thing that I would have kept my mouth shut about. I mean if somebody said, “Where
have you been?” I would have said, “Oh, I was down at Woolworth’s doing sit-ins.” You
know? And, then, whatever was in front of me, like at the theater to do, I would have
done next. I mean I don’t think I would have—I don’t think I would have made a thing of
it. Because at that time I didn’t see that, yeah, I went and sat in, but it didn’t feel like I
was a very big cog in this wheel. It seemed to me there was a huge amount of students
from Bennett and A&T. And they were the, you know, and certain students were,
obviously, the driving force and the main guys, and the main women. But I mean I just
felt like I was down there to help. That was it. And, so, it didn’t seem like a big deal to
me as far as talking about it when I got back to campus.
HT: Did you try to get anyone else to join you the next time you went down?
23
BT: You know, I can’t remember. It was not a conversation that sticks in my head. Why? It
seems to me I certainly would have. I would have said, “Hey, we’re going to do this
again tomorrow, come on down.” That would have been a natural response of mine. But
specifically to go around and—
HT: And try to solicit some—
BT: No, I don’t think so. I figured the people who would have gone down knew that it was
going on; and, therefore, they had the ability to make the choice to join or not. That was
my feeling about it. Pretty much everybody I think in Guilford and like in the art
department, the music department, [and] theater department knew by the third day that it
was happening. And, so, it was up to each and every person how involved they were
going to get.
HT: Now, were you and the other of the three students, Marilyn, Genie, and Ann, were you all
called in together to talk to Katherine Taylor, or was it individual?
BT: Well, I wasn’t called in to talk with them. I know that. Her conversation with me was
one-on-one.
HT: One-on-one?
BT: Yes. I can’t speak to what they—when they did the big speech and singled us out—not
singled us out, but definitely made it aware that we were the group they were talking
about, we were all kind of sitting together, yes.
HT: We have a copy of Chancellor Blackwell’s speech to that assembly. I think he, and I’m
sure Katherine Taylor, were very concerned about the reputation of the Woman’s
College.
BT: Okay. [laughs] Okay. They were concerned about how many parents were going to pull
their kids out of school. Yes, but they didn’t see the bigger picture that the reputation of
the college would be enhanced. But they couldn’t see that picture.
HT: No, not at all.
BT: And they were very hide-bound. Katherine Taylor for all her intellectual learning and
knowledge really missed the big picture a lot of times, I thought.
HT: That’s usual, because she was a graduate of WC when it was called North Carolina
College for Women at that time?
BT: Right.
HT: And she was in the WAVES [women’s division of the US Navy] during World War II
she had done a lot of traveling, and I understand was a highly intelligent, brilliant—
24
BT: Brilliant. But she wasn’t using it for good purpose.
HT: Well, she was a product of the South.
BT: Yes.
HT: At the time. And you have to look at it that way.
BT: I understand.
HT: Let me see.
BT: But she was also against opening her mind to new ideas.
HT: Do you recall, were there any threats made against you, or Ann, or Marilyn, or Genie?
BT: Just—well, the threat from the college, yes.
HT: Right.
BT: That was the biggest one. The one at the lunch counter, the white woman behind me who
the guys were trying to instigate to take—they had like—it wasn’t a two-by-four. It was
like about a one-by-three. It wasn’t big enough to be a two-by-four. I don’t think she
could have picked up a two-by-four. It was like a one-by-three. And it was maybe about
three or four feet long or something, not more than that.
HT: I’m surprised the police didn’t take that away from her.
BT: Well, they just—police weren’t very much in charge of what was going on, believe me.
And they were trying to get her to take that and hit me, because it would have been a
white woman hitting a white woman. And she was going to do it. She was going to do it.
They put money out there for her.
HT: And it was betting going on?
BT: No, they were going to pay her.
HT: Oh.
BT: A couple of them came up with $10s and $5s and that was a lot then. And, you know,
probably grew to $25, $35 by the time everything was done. And she was going to hit
me. But nobody talked about whether it was legal. I mean the assumption was, of course,
she would get arrested. I mean nobody even addressed that. And that was when I was
sitting there going, “If they even come close, I’m going to take that right out of her
hand.” And that’s when the ladies from Bennett said, “No, you’re not.” But that was the
only physical threat I ever felt. The threat to my college career was from the college.
25
HT: And what did your family and [friends] have to say about all this when they found out?
BT: My family is such a funny thing. They were liberal Democrats from Pittsburgh,
[Pennsylvania], union people all the way. I grew up with a fairly liberal upbringing with
this great dollop of conservative Republicanism thrown into the deal when it came to
race. Even though they had gone to school totally integrated. Pittsburgh schools were not
segregated, never had been. They—but still they made a differentiation. And that’s also
for my mother because of her years during World War II. It wasn’t safe to be a Jew in
Europe. To tell you the truth, it wasn’t safe to be a Jew here either. There was lots of—
her father’s shop was burned to the ground, and he was beaten. And this was in
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
HT: This happened in 1930s?
BT: ’30s, yes. And there was a lot of that kind of feeling. And in our neighborhood, which
was just tremendously WASP [White Anglo-Saxon Protestant], outside of Washington,
DC, the people who lived next door to us, the Glacers [family], were definitely Jewish. It
was no mistaking that. And my mother had by that time disassociated herself with being
Jewish at least when she was in Falls Church. And she said, “And never tell anybody
you’re Jewish. They will hurt you.” This is what I heard. And, indeed, things happened to
the Glacers, which was just despicable. So—and here we’re talking the ’50s. The woman
across the street accused him of being a Communist. And he was a brilliant man in math
and physics, high up, as far as math and physics go, not as an administrative guy in the
government, was working on really important stuff. And he was kicked out of his job just
on the say so of the woman across the street. The reason she said that was because they
were Jewish. See, I went to school with all this—he got up every morning, put his top
coat on, picked up his briefcase, walked to the top of the street and caught the bus to DC.
So that his children would not know—yeah.
HT: This was during the McCarthy [era].
BT: Yes. So, I had this liberal background but with this really weird conservative streak when
it came to being other. And when my mother found out that I had done this she said,
“That is not what we sent you to school to do. We are not paying for you to—” I said,
“You are not paying it anyway, so knock that off.” Dad’s paying child support, comes
to—it came to something like $900 a year. I mean the rest was me. She said, “Well, this
is not why you were supposed to be in school.” And I said, “I think it’s exactly why I’m
supposed to be in school.” So, we had some moments about this.
HT: To your knowledge was there any kind of correspondence between the college
administration and your mother?
BT: I did not hear of any. If there was, she never mentioned it. And I never found it in any of
her letters and stuff after she died.
HT: But there was some between Genie’s family—
26
BT: Yes.
HT: And I think in Marilyn’s case, too.
BT: That’s right that there was. Yes.
HT: Genie told me when I interviewed her a couple of years ago that her father almost lost his
business because of it. They were from Florida, central Florida. And he had, I think, a
construction-type business. I’m not sure. And his business, apparently, dropped off. And
it appeared in a local paper and this kind of thing.
BT: Oh.
HT: She said that was the worst outcome of the whole episode was that her father almost lost
his business because of that. And she felt so terrible because it did that to the family.
BT: Right. No, I never heard anything. I mean my mother felt that what I had done was
embarrass her family. Why? Because I stood up for what was right? I mean she could not
see the correlation that if people had done this over in Europe for our family, what else?
And all families, not just us. But she never got that correlation. And, to me, I thought that
was the point kind of, or part of the point.
HT: Well, we’ve heard from various sources that Martin Luther King, [Jr.], or his
organization, had contacted some of the participants in the Sit-ins. Have you ever heard
of that?
BT: I’ve never heard of that. One of the things I liked about this is, this grew right out of
those four students. And nobody was controlling their actions. The Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee grew out of this and what happened in Raleigh. That was
homegrown right on North Carolina soil, right? And people like—like [Washington, DC]
Mayor Marion Barry, and Jesse Jackson, were just getting their feet wet in civil rights.
And they and other people were the beginners, if not the founders, I don’t want to put that
on them. I don’t know exactly their connection. But I do know that they were involved
with the beginning of this thing called the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
And the reason it was called that, the coordinating committee was to coordinate all the
rides and cabs and buses so that all the students could go back and forth from their
campuses. We’re talking A&T and Bennett and not miss any classes. That was the
coordinating committee. And the word, “nonviolence” was very important in that, you
know? So, that grew right out of, I believe it started actually in Raleigh technically. And
very quickly it was a Greensboro thing as well. As far as I knew, certainly in the early
days, Martin Luther King and his organizations were not part of this. That they saw the
opportunity to come on board and be part of that later. I can certainly understand. Those
guys did it— made it happen. But they never—I was never contacted, no.
HT: What about the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation]?
27
BT: The FBI was always involved. Let’s face it. No one ever contacted me, but nothing
happens like that that the FBI doesn’t have somebody there. There were probably FBI
people teaching on campus at A&T. FBI and J. Edgar Hoover were definitely very afraid
of anything that had the word “black” and “movement” in the same sentence. I don’t say
this as a radical.
When I was in high school I went down to the demonstrations that [George]
Lincoln Rockwell had, a would-be Nazi guy, who had this house in Arlington [Virginia]
and would have about five storm troopers. We would all on Saturday morning, there were
about twelve of us go down there and just laugh ourselves silly, because it was just
stupidest, ridiculous thing we had ever seen. And you would listen to his speeches, and
you would go, “Oh, my God, I hope nobody really listens to this dribble, et cetera.” Well,
to find out from one of our fellow students, his father worked at the FBI. He said, “Would
you guys stop going down there.” And we said, “Why?” He said, “My dad wants you to
know that you all each have a file now.” And we were just going down because it was a
hoot. Not to demonstrate for anything, just listen to the stuff and say, “I cannot believe
this,” right? And I’ve had a file ever since.
HT: Have you ever seen your file?
BT: No, I’ve heard about my file, though. And, of course, once we got to the anti-war stuff.
I’m sure that my file got very large—well, not very large, people who have whole rooms,
I’m sure. It got to be a lot fatter. But I came to be aware that there isn’t anything that you
do like that, or at least in those times, that didn’t have FBI presence.
HT: Well, is there anything you’d like to add about the Greensboro Sit-ins that we haven’t
covered before we go on to the next segment? Any regrets about having participated?
BT: No, not one. Actually, as small as my participation was, and it certainly wasn’t major, I
still consider this one of the “bestest” things—“bestest” isn’t a word, but that I’ve ever
done. I’m not talking about heroic or, the most spectacular, any of that. It’s just in terms
of doing what is right and being true to yourself, and all of that. For myself as a person, I
think it is—it ranks up there with one of the best things I ever did. Absolutely. There’s a
few others, but they’re not related to this.
HT: I know you came down in February when they had the grand opening of the
[International Civil Rights Center and] Museum. What did you think of the Museum?
BT: Well, I didn’t get to indulge myself too much in the Museum then. When we came again
in April for the alumni—
HT: Yes.
BT: We got to spend some time down there. And somebody greased some skids for us, which
was very nice, and we got to sit at the counters. And what was interesting is the women
who had come along with us, alums of the class of ’60, and had gotten to talk to us a lot
during all of this after we did the presentation in the auditorium, right? They stood
28
there—and they asked questions like you’re asking. Like, “Where were the people?” And
it was neat. Because I tried—I sat as close as I could figure out to where I had sat in
relationship to the mirror so I could judge it by, where the mirror ended and about where
I was. And it was really neat to be able to turn and for a moment your eyes saw it again.
And be able to describe to them, “Like right where you’re standing,” you know, and that
sort of thing, to make it—to use it as a teaching exercise. I have found out that I love
teaching, actually, when it’s real, not curriculum. And be able to give back to them a
sense of what went on.
Again, some of them were saying they wished they had gone down. But they
couldn’t. I understood that totally. They even apologized for not coming along. And I
thought, “No, no. You just—next time you do it.” And that’s—
HT: Well, speaking of that. We know that you, and Genie, and Marilyn, and Ann participated.
But Betty had—Betty Carter had been contacted by several people who said they also
participated. And, of course, there’s no proof. And I don’t know if it is actual fact, or
people are just—
BT: Well, if you mention some names.
HT: I cannot, I cannot remember.
BT: I think she mentioned Sadye Dunn possibly. And I am very willing to believe that finally
at some point along the line Sadye Dunn finally listened to the inside of herself and went
and did that. But it would have been, I think, sometime later.
HT: Because the Sit-ins took place from 1 February to, I think there was a hiatus somewhere.
BT: There was.
HT: But it wasn’t until July 25th, which they just had a 50th anniversary of when
Woolworth’s was actually integrated.
BT: When it was resolved.
HT: When it resolved. So, there was a long period of time. Other people could have gone
down. And if they didn’t have their class jackets on, nobody would have known.
BT: Exactly.
HT: By that time they probably would have known what troubles you and others got in
because you had the class jackets on.
BT: Right. But I had heard some names. And some of the names I do not know. As Betty
Carter said if you asked who was there for something or other you find that half the world
says they were there for whatever it was.
29
HT: Right. Sort of like Woodstock. Everybody participated.
BT: Ten million people went to Woodstock, right? But she mentioned a couple of names. And
that’s one that clicked with me. Okay.
HT: So—
BT: Sadye Dunn finally realized, you know, if this is a person who I thought always had those
kinds of things inside of her that she—and the question was, would she ever listen to
those things. And when I heard that name I thought, “Well, good, she finally did it.”
HT: Well, you know, for the longest time we didn’t know that you participated. Because for
years and years it was always Ann, and Marilyn, and Genie.
BT: And the photos—their names were mentioned in the paper.
HT: Right. And, so—
BT: Although Ann—if they had read your very own paper—
HT: You mean The Carolinian newspaper?
BT: Yeah. Ann Dearsley wrote articles for it in which she mentioned all of us.
HT: I think that’s how Betty Carter finally found that your name was mentioned somewhere.
But there was no photograph there.
BT: No, but Ann Dearsley knew I had been there. And it may—and she put it in her thing.
One thing Marilyn doesn’t remember too much about, it’s probably because it ended up
being very aborted. It seemed to me that while they were on hiatus several of us got
together in the Commons Room at New Guilford and decided to put together—even
though we weren’t really newspaper people—I think we went—no, first, we put this
together. We laid it all out. We wrote articles. We did a layout just like, I guess, it would
have to go to a newspaper, as close as we understood how to do that. And, then, we went
to whoever was the editor of The Carolinian and said, “We think we ought to put out one
entire issue,” duh, duh, duh. Well, they would not do that.
HT: They were probably afraid.
BT: They were being prohibited from doing that. So, we said, “Okay, who is your printer?
We’ll go down and just have this printed, and we’ll pay for the printing ourselves,” duh,
duh, duh. And we went and contacted somebody in Greensboro, and, obviously, he had
been contacted. He would not touch it.
HT: Oh.
30
BT: And—
HT: Now, today you wouldn’t have that problem, because you could blog about it on the
Internet.
BT: No kidding. Right.
HT: Or all those other sources.
BT: Right. But, you know, having to write—spend a few days sharpens up your thinking
about it. Sometimes I think people blog, and they just run off at the mouth, and there’s no
actual good thought going into that.
HT: Do you know by chance what happened to that layout and that—
BT: You know, I wish, but I don’t have it. Marilyn barely even remembers that we did this.
Although, she had—being an English major, I think we depended on her to do better
writing than the rest of us. But I remember doing that. And I think it was during the time
of the hiatus that we thought this—somebody has to publish this. It just did a little blink.
We’re having—it’s because the storm is coming is causing that.
HT: That’s fine. Okay. Well, after you graduated, this was 1962, what did you do next?
BT: Oh, I went to New York City to have my big theater career.
HT: Was that planned?
BT: Yeah, that’s where I wanted to go. And that’s what I wanted to do. And I knew I would
have to have a day job, as they call it. But at least I tried to keep the day job in the
entertainment industry. I worked for Frank Loesser for awhile. And, then, I worked for
London Records for awhile.
HT: Frank Loesser, that sounds so familiar.
BT: Guys and Dolls.
HT: Okay.
BT: How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.
HT: You worked in his office?
BT: Yeah.
HT: Wow.
31
BT: Although, I wasn’t a secretary. He had a whole little empire there. I was part of the
empire. He had a whole musical comedy Broadway show empire. He produced a lot of
shows. He produced Music Man. It wasn’t his, but—and, of course, constant visitor to us
was the guy who worked Music Man. His name just went right out of my head.
HT: Was it Meredith—?
BT: Yeah, Meredith Wilson. Thank you. So, you know, that was always exciting. And while I
was doing that I was working at small-time theater here and there, whatever I could. But
it wasn’t very much, and it wasn’t very satisfying.
HT: What was it like living in New York in the early ’60s?
BT: Well, part of it exhilarating. I mean some of the stuff—I remember going down—I spent
a lot of time in the [Greenwich] Village late at night. And you’d go to some little coffee
shop or something, and somebody would be singing. Or somebody would be singing in
the park. And one time the guy singing in the park was Bob Dylan. And this was just
before—just before all of a sudden everybody knew who Bob Dylan was. So, there were,
you know, Loudon Wainwright, those kinds of people doing something in some little
smoky coffee shop before they were who they were. Exciting times.
HT: And how long did you stay in New York?
BT: And I really liked all that in the theater in New York. You know, just—I mean to go see
it, all the stuff that was going on. Saint Marks Theatre doing The Blacks by Jean Genet,
The Fantastics, going on down to the Village. Lots of good stuff. But the city kind of
finally defeated me, I think. It was just like an uphill battle just to make it across town, it
seems like, every day.
Oh, also, while I was there JFK [John F. Kennedy] got shot. I was working for
London Records then. And I can tell you this, they delayed the information in the United
States. The Walter Cronkite announcement, I’m not saying he delayed it. It was delayed.
He probably just found out about it, too. But we knew about it two hours earlier because
we were on the phone to the home office in London, which knew that he was dead.
That’s when I started to learn that was a time to be in New York City when that
happened. That was a time. And I—I was also there during the 1963 thing on the Mall.
Took the bus down. Stood there with the others, whatever it was—200,000 people. Got
on the bus, and went back to work the next day.
HT: So, after you left New York, where did you go next?
BT: Back to the Falls Church area. It was Alexandria, [Virginia] actually. And, then, I—for
ten years worked for the Miter Corporation, which is a think tank, a nonprofit research
and development, which grew out of Lincoln Labs up in Massachusetts. And I was an
administrator. And, then, I said, “Look, you really want to do theater.” And I was doing it
on the side, and it was starting to become that I had to make choices. And I made the
choice. I decided to do theater and starve. So, I did Miter Corporation from ’65 to ’75,
32
roughly. And, then, from ’75—well, it was before ’75. I started doing theater about ’70.
And, then, moved out here permanently in ’80. I kept doing theater. I mean that was a
neat thing is that I had friends in DC. I could go in and do three or four days at a time and
still be back down here. But after awhile I knew I had to find something out here. And
that was when the pottery happened.
HT: Had you always been interested in pottery?
BT: No.
HT: So, how did that come about?
BT: Found out it was good with my hands. And then karate, I started taking karate. And, then,
after about five or six years of that found out that I could teach. I was helping somebody
out teaching a class one day. And I thought.
HT: Now, where did you learn to do pottery?
BT: There was a potter right here in Rappahannock County, [Virginia] who lives—if you go
back down that road you came up on, about ten minutes, fifteen minutes, down the road
and hang a right, that’s from here. She has a studio back in the hills there. And her name
is Jeanne Drebas. She does wonderful pottery. I apprenticed with her for two or three
years, the old-fashioned system.
HT: How do you spell her name?
BT: First name, Jeanne, I think it’s J-E-A-N-N—and I think it’s just an E on the end. Sorry.
HT: I can put it on pause.
[recorder turned off and back on]
HT: Okay. Go ahead.
BT: Drebas, D-R-E-B-A-S. And part of her work, the production part of her work, she didn’t
want to do any more. She only wanted to do her special stuff. And she’s a great artist. I
mean the only person I know that can mix medias that no one has ever tried to mix
before, and just come out super.
HT: And she still has a studio?
BT: Oh, yeah. She still just does fabulous stuff. Well, what I do is nothing like she does. I
took over the production part of her business. And my friend, Pam Fletcher, and I—we
actually paid her for that. And set up shop, built a studio, and the rest, as they say, is
history.
33
HT: Sounds like it’s very interesting. Any particular specialty?
BT: Oh, yes, I’m one of the great, great American art tile makers. American art tile as in
handmade, hand-painted, hand-fired, hand everything. I have a particular signature kind
of a design which involves plants, the natural world. And I know tile doesn’t sound like
it, but it’s really big. Up until the late 1800s all tile has been imported until Mercer up in
Pennsylvania, John Henry—Henry Mercer, Henry Mercer said, “You know, we need
American tiles with American designs, and American feeling.” And he was part of that
whole American arts and crafts movement. And instilled in some people the love of
American art tile, which then I became addicted to somewhere in the ’80s. And, now, I’m
actually one of the—I don’t want to say great. Let’s say I’m one of the recognized
makers of American art tile.
HT: And how do you market this?
BT: Well, that’s hard. You go to shows. You go to galleries. You have your stuff in galleries.
We’re just getting set up where we can actually be able to sell it off the Web. And once
we do that, I think, of course, oodles of money will come in.
HT: Well, let’s hope so. Oh, my goodness.
BT: Well, the Web is, you don’t have to travel to sell it off the Web.
HT: And you can do it worldwide.
BT: Yes, you can.
HT: Which is very nice.
BT: But I do like going to some of the shows. Because we get invited. We rarely ever apply to
a show any more. We get a call saying, “Would you come, bring your stuff to our show.”
And I kind of like that.
HT: So, you set up a table, or a booth, or something?
BT: A booth, or maybe it’s a large space, a gallery, and we have a certain section of the
gallery. Or, you know, that sort of thing. You know?
HT: That’s great. It sounds like you really enjoy doing that?
BT: Yes, because I’m always inventing new ways to do it. I just did a really nice big piece,
bigger than I’ve ever done before, and it worked fine. And now I’m going to go to the
next big piece. And that piece was, basically, two feet by four feet, which is big when
you’re going flat and you have to make the piece for the wall. But the next one is going to
be four feet by eight feet.
34
HT: And you put this in a kiln to fire it?
BT: Yes. Well you have to cut it up into pieces. And part of that is to cut it up into interesting
shapes.
HT: So, it all fits together like a jigsaw puzzle?
BT: Yeah, right, right, right.
HT: That’s very interesting.
BT: And I meant to bring a little box of tiles for you to take back for you, Betty Carter, Linda
Carter, Linda Dunston-Stacy, and Stephanie Cole. But I didn’t get that done. The rib
thing has put me way off my schedule.
HT: I can imagine so.
BT: So, I am just going to have to pack up a box of six of my tiles and ship them down to you.
And, then, you let everybody know there’s a tile in there for them.
HT: Oh, how wonderful. Thank you.
BT: And everybody can just pick out their own tile.
HT: Do I get first choice?
BT: You get first choice. But I wanted you to have one, and Betty, and Linda Carter, Linda
Dunston-Stacy, and Stephanie Cole because it was just wonderful meeting you all. And
that’s my little thank you. That’s really what that’s about.
HT: Well, have you been involved with the university since you graduated?
BT: This year was the first time. No, there was one time about two years after I graduated
where I called them back and said, “You have me down as the class of ’63. I am the class
of ’62. Will you, please, make that change and get that right?” And they never did. So, I
said, “To heck with it.” I mean if your alumni association can’t get you in the right class,
I’m not paying attention to stuff. I’ve got other things to do anyway. And I—when I was
there I thought that whole alumni week and stuff like that happened, I thought that was
just so many old ladies that had nothing better to do than to turn up and gab. I just—that
was small of me, but it was the way I felt. They all come with their little suits, and their
bags, and their corsages. And it reminded me of one of the wonderful routines that that
wonderful woman who was a great comic, who was not well known, who did classic
music and would always talk about the ladies arriving with the corsage. And, you know,
the local ladies group, basically. So, that’s what I thought of that. And, then, I called up
and asked this request, which never happened. Now, when this all happened one of the
conversations that I had very early on, before I came down to February, and I told Betty
35
Carter that they depended on this. And I talked to Linda Carter, and I said—and she said,
“And they never fixed it?” And I said, “And they never fixed it.” She said, “Consider it
done.” And, then, I decided I was coming.
HT: Good.
BT: Because I felt if she could get that done, and she did instantly, I was now class of ’62,
that—and the school, much to my amazement, was honoring the fact that some of its
students had been part of what happened, was now owning that, was now contributing to
that, was now the thing that they had basically gone like this about. They were now
celebrating. And I thought, “Okay, the school can get my graduation date correct, and,
and, and, they had done a little 180 here. Yeah, I think I could go down and see what’s
going on.” And, then, I met Betty, and Stephanie, and Linda, and Linda, and I was just
knocked out at how great these—they were nothing like the people in administration
when I was there. They were pretty much fuddy duddies, and you were just so hide-bound.
These were people who were vibrant, and open, and wonderful. So, I thought,
“Yeah, I could be a part of this.” That’s what I thought.
HT: Well, Betsy, I don’t have any other questions for you. Did you have anything you’d like
to add we haven’t covered? Because we’ve covered quite a bit this afternoon.
BT: Probably there are things I’ll think of when I get home tonight. But I think, basically, you
have pretty much soup to nuts here. Maybe a few crumbs lost in between because you
can never remember everything.
HT: No. And it has been fifty years.
BT: Yes, it stands out pretty, you know, there are things in my mind that I remember that are
still very sharply etched, the JFK assassination, I hate to say, this, and a few other things.
And those are sharp. And some of the memories at Woman’s College, very specific little
events that happened to me of a personal or social nature, which are very deeply etched,
and which I just treasure.
HT: So, it sounds like Woman’s College and participating in the Greensboro Sit-ins had a
profound effect on your life?
BT: Absolutely. That is correct. And to think that the school that I saw as a hide-bound totally
stuck in the mud Southern school ended up—yeah, I mean, well, academically, I wasn’t
surprised, not that I was great at academics. But, I mean, with faculty like that, that
always made an impression. The fact that Betty Lou Toome got me into that school made
an impression. Because it made me reevaluate myself. I was worthy of being in college.
HT: Had you ever thought of going to any other school other than Woman’s College?
BT: My father let me know that I wasn’t going to any college. And Betty Lou Toome came to
me and said, “Why are you taking these other courses like typing and stuff?” I explained.
36
And she said, “Oh, hogwash. You should apply to a school.” And I said, “I can’t get into
a school.” She said, “Look, the College Boards are coming up”—this was my junior year.
She said, “Go take the College Boards. Let’s see what your score is. If it’s good, I know
how to get you in the University in North Carolina,” and she did. And they were good. I
was surprised. I was totally surprised. And I said, “Well, where did this come from?” She
said, “Exactly, where did this come from?” She said, “Because your grades don’t match
that.” She said, “Right now the rest of your junior year and your senior year I’d be getting
those grades up. Work on it. Because the College Boards don’t stand alone. You’ve got to
have something to back it up.” And I mean I was dumbfounded.
I never thought of myself as being academically good, shall we say. It wasn’t that
it was great. But, God, it was better than anything I thought I could do. The little story
about myself, the day of the College Boards, early in the morning I opened the window of
my bedroom, which was on the second floor. I had something that I let down my personal
belongings to the ground. Climbed out, hung from the window seal, and dropped to the
ground. Walked to the top of the street where a friend of mine picked me up, and went
and took the College Boards.
HT: Why did you have to do that?
BT: Well, nobody from my family was going to take me. And because my father had told me
that I wasn’t taking College Boards. Betty Lou Toome actually leant me the money to do
it. Because you have to pay, so. And, so, I had to sneak out of my own house. I know this
sounds—that’s—my family was like I said this weird mixture of very liberal politics in
one way. I mean they thought McCarthy was full of crap. I mean they hated all of that.
But on the other hand, just, so, that’s how I took the College Boards. And it’s sort of how
I went off to school. This time I had the help of my mother. She said, “Well, we’ll go buy
you a couple of little foot lockers. We’ll ship them off. And I, basically, that day with a
suitcase took the bus into town to Union Station, caught the train. It’s a good train. It goes
from DC, down to Greensboro.
HT: Well, after you did graduate was your family proud and happy for you and that sort of
thing?
BT: Not particularly. Well, see, one of the reasons I was put in the class of ’63 is even with all
that stuff I took, a lot of it was audited or just sat in. It turns out that in the end I was one,
one whatever you call it, credit, one credit shy of the required number of credits, which
nobody had picked up on until like two weeks before graduation. I certainly thought I had
plenty. But I didn’t due to whatever. So, over the summer I stayed and took a wonderful,
wonderful speech course. But because of that, the way the rules were at that time, if you
didn’t graduate with your class, you were thrown into the next year.
HT: Right. Because now we have December graduation ceremonies. But in those days—
BT: Exactly.
HT: —there wasn’t such a thing.
37
BT: Right, exactly. So, my mother was just really pissed that I hadn’t done it when I was
supposed to. And I said to her even, “Would you have come down for the graduation?”
And she said, “Well, you know, I couldn’t afford to.” And there was no way I could get
down there.” And I said, “Okay, then I mean I’m sorry to disappoint you, but you weren’t
going to be there anyway.”
HT: So, did you go to your graduation in the May of ’63?
BT: No, I was in New York working. I wasn’t going to do that. And by that time I think they
were divorced. If my father knew that I had graduated, then somebody like my mother
told him I had. I’m not sure he was even aware that it happened. I certainly never heard
from him about it. I didn’t get a little, “Congratulations.” None of that. But that was fine.
Because as far as I was concerned to a certain extent college had very little to do with
them. I don’t mean that as a put down, but they had pulled out of that picture early on.
So, that’s the way it was. My brother was excited because, I mean, he thought going to
college was a great thing. He was going to go. He had everything paid for when he went.
Dad funded that totally. But he was excited. He was the only one in the whole family that
thought, “Wow.” I was the first person whose last name was Toth on my father’s side of
the family to graduate from college. But that wasn’t really acknowledged. The one that
got acknowledged was when my brother graduated from college.
HT: And where did he go to school?
BT: He went to Case Western Reserve [University, Cleveland, Ohio], engineering, and all the
things my dad wanted him to do. Now, he ended up being kind of a dissident, too, in his
own way. And has in the end done himself proud in that, yeah. He was at the Pentagon—
that big one. But, also, what he’s done with his career is he didn’t stay in engineering. He
got into Middle East Studies, and he teaches eight months of the year at the University of
Cairo in Egypt. And, then, the other four months he comes home to be with his wife in
Boston. They have this wonderful relationship which, actually, they get through better
being—
HT: Separated.
BT: —separated than together, and separated and then together. Yeah. And sometimes she
goes over to visit him during the regular year. So, she gets to go to Cairo. And he’s pretty
much an expert on—I mean it’s under the field of sociology, sociology, anthropology.
But by anthropology, I mean cultural modern-day anthropology. And he graduated from
Binghamton [University, Binghamton, New York] and put together what he called Mid-
East Studies. He was the first PhD in that. So, that was definitely going against the grain.
HT: Okay. Let’s see. Betsy, is there anything else you would like to add?
BT: No. Well now you know my background.
HT: Well, thank you so much. It has been very interesting.
38
BT: Well, again, thank you for coming up.
HT: You are so welcome.
BT: Are you going to be talking to Marilyn?
HT: [Yes.]
[End of Interview]